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Why Tomo?

The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, resulted in a massive tsunami that caused the loss of life and livelihood for thousands of people in the northern Tohoku region of Japan. So many teens in Tohoku have lost parents, siblings, relatives, friends, homes, schools, and huge swaths of their cities, towns and villages. Their teen worlds have been upended.

Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction was published on March 10, 2012. Proceeds from the sales of Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction will go to organizations that assist teens in the quake and tsunami hit areas. Tomo, which means friend in Japanese, aims to bring Japan stories to young adult readers worldwide, and in so doing, help support teens in Tohoku.

About the Tomo Editor

Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com and hatbooks.blogspot.com) is the author of the young adult verse novels The Language Insideand Orchards, the forthcoming middle grade novel Falling into the Dragon's Mouth, the novel Ash, the picture book The Wakame Gatherers, and the forthcoming picture book Twilight Chant. She is a regular contributor to the ANA magazine Wingspan, and is the editor of Tomo, an anthology of young adult Japan-related fiction to benefit teens affected by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.

A native of Massachusetts, Holly earned a B.A. in
biology from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in fiction writing from the New York University Creative Writing Program. A longtime resident of Japan, she teaches writing at Yokohama City
University, Grub Street Creative Writing Center in Boston, and online at UC Berkeley Extension.

Holly's fiction often relates to Japan. Her YA verse novel The Language Inside(Delacorte/Random House, 2013) deals with language both spoken and unspoken and, through poetry that crosses boundaries, connects a Japan-raised American girl with a Cambodian-American boy and patients they work with in a long-term care center. In her YA verse novel Orchards (Delacorte/Random House, 2011), which received the 2012 APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Kana, a half Japanese and half Jewish-American girl, is sent to spend the summer with Shizuoka relatives after the death of a classmate. Her novel Ash
(Stone Bridge Press, 2001) set in Kagoshima and Kyoto, Japan, has been
recommended as a teaching tool in high school and university classrooms studying Japan, Asia and
intercultural issues. Her picture book The Wakame Gatherers
(Shen's Books, 2007) depicts a bicultural girl who goes seaweed
gathering with her Japanese and American grandmothers. Holly edited and wrote the foreword to Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction--An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories, a young adult anthology of Japan-related fiction to benefit teens in the earthquake- and tsunami-affected areas of Tohoku. For more information about Tomo, visit the Tomo blog.

Holly's short
stories, poems and essays have been published in magazines and journals in
the United States and Japan. She frequently presents and leads workshops at schools and conferences throughout Asia and in the U.S. She has served as Regional Advisor of the Japan chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI Japan) since 2004.